Why don't we love Mitt Romney?

They live among us, but they are not really part of us. They pretend to be like us only in order to gain our votes.

They are the Others, those who insinuate themselves into American life, but who are not “real” Americans at all.

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For years, his opponents have tried to portray Barack Obama as an Other.

Rabid racists on the right, joined by just plain cuckoos — hey, Donald Trump, money not only can’t buy love, it can’t buy brains, either — believe or pretend to believe that Obama was not born in America.

But as the birthers have fizzled, they have been replaced by more mainstream and more socially acceptable attacks on Obama’s “otherness”: Mitt Romney’s claim that Obama is a European-style socialist, for instance.

“He takes his inspiration from Europe and the European socialists in Europe,” Romney says of Obama. “I believe in America.”

By implication, Obama does not believe in America. Which is why Romney says we are now engaged in a battle for “the soul of America” in which voters must choose between “a European-style welfare state” or “a free land.”

But the Democrats have reacted cleverly. Hold on, they say, the real Other in the race is Mitt Romney. He is the guy, they say, who does not act like a real American.

Because how many real Americans keeps millions of dollars in foreign banks?

“Hey, how many of you all have a Swiss bank account?” Joe Biden asked voters gathered in Exeter, N.H., in April.

Biden described Romney using classic terms of “otherness.” Romney, Biden said, was “out of touch” and “out of step” with basic American values.

The attack is now part of Biden’s stump speech.

“Did you ever think you’d be choosing between two people running for president, one of whom has a Swiss bank account?” Biden asks crowds.

Nobody is saying (as of yet) that Romney did anything illegal by keeping millions of dollars in Swiss and other foreign banks. It just seems … odd.

Democratic officeholders, in what is obviously a coordinated attack, have picked up the theme. Martin O’Malley, the Democratic governor of Maryland, who may be eyeing his own presidential run someday, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Romney is betting “against America.”